1
Ninety-four people. Twelve weeks apiece. Got 'em all through our revolving door in eighteen months. One primary outcome: a pain score, zero to ten, once a week.
And a difference between the two arms you could hide behind a decimal point. Null.
2
It was time to get serious. I put the file under the bare lamp. Worked it over. I demanded the pain score by arm. By week. By site, by age, by which clinic did the intake.
But I couldn't make it sing. It made its statement in month four and was sticking to it.
3
Those diaries come in on paper. Somebody typed ninety-four people's handwriting into your columns.
Double entry would have caught it.
And you think I didn't do double entry?
She was right. And she was also wrong. Took me until three that morning to untangle the knot.
4
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Double entry will catch a seven that was really a one. Or a nine that was really a four.
What it can't catch are the things that happen outside the lines.
And that's exactly what I found, two floors down at three in the morning.
5
Participant thirty-one. Scribbled in the margin because it couldn't fit anywhere else:
Still hurts. But I got to the post office and back on Tuesday.
Twelve of the ninety-four said the pain was the same, but their lives were different.
6
Twelve margins isn't a finding. It goes in the next protocol as a real outcome, measured on purpose. The only one lost to follow-up was me.
You do the eighteen months. You sweat the box until it talks. What you got still isn't a conviction.
But it's a lead.